Band of Brothers: Pat

The journalists are strange people... They may make infinitely ask Michael the same questions about how exactly he was "loosing his weight" during the filming of "The Hunger", or how he increased his muscles to play Stilios in blockbuster "300"...
But all of them, in a strange unanimity, have bypassed the fact that the topic "The Second World War" in the artistic collection of the actor they are not so interested in (the fact is confirmed with endless standard interviews) is announced brightly and unusually; moreover, he was permitted to look at the problem of this panhuman tragedy with the eyes of three persons standing on different sides of the fences...

We will come back to the film of Quentin Tarantino later... in the right time, in the right place and "in our own shoes"...
And while we'll mark that, watching the mini-serial "Band of Brothers" not wholly (by the reason of existence of the notorious "hands-scissors") and the fragments of the film "Our Hidden Lives" (as in the DVD-format it was never released, and we had absolutely no possibility to reach the time and place of its showing on the English TV), we couldn't free ourselves from the strange feeling of "dissociated involvement"...

Pat Christenson could easily be the witness of the episode when lieutenant Spears offered cigarettes (according to the legend, they were twenty or thirty) to the German POWs, before finishing them off and among these "unluckies" could easily be the man we will talk about in detail – the German POW from "Our Hidden Lives" (the image on the screen is generalized character, but, in the book by Simon Garfield he most probably had the name Heinz)...
This young friend of the "kind" arty Englishman B. Charles, while speaking about how the American soldiers took from him and his "band of brothers”, assigned for expiatory works, all their personal things (up to wedding rings and family pictures) and, while sharing his hatred towards them, could easily meant and Pat Christenson as well...

Not watching laterally with the impartiality of judges, but fully getting the hang of the essence of this and that world-view, you involuntarily get into the millstones of "reflectionsisms" about how to make in such a way that all the existing ideologies imposed and enforced by somebody's will from above, should not knock the real people together making them hate delightedly and destroy themselves with pleasure, having previously offered the last odorous "tobacco girlfriend", or denied in this joy...

Aren't you agree? Do you like to argue very much? But the guys from then Easy Company themselves speak about that...

"We were always saying that a good Kraut was a dead Kraut. But most of them were only kids. We all were kids..." "I thought about it much... This guy and me, we could have become friends; we could have much in common... They did the things they had to, and I tried to do what I had to...
But, in other circumstances, we all could have become good friends..."

And now, probably, we can go on...
That is one of the best films about the war of 1939 - 1945 seen ever... They have been seen so many... sooo many... maybe, only Russian can really understand that "sooo"... No other country has so many screen stories dedicated to the Second World War... and so, you can believe on our bare word... moreover that the best films on that topic are kept in out personal DVD-collection, which has been gathered and is being gathered with awe and taste...

What distinguishes the "Band of Brothers" from a long line of dramatic stories, which, as one, speak about the heroes... having names and nameless... having survived and not having lived to see the Victory day?
And everything is very simple… the absence of pathos... and also in the fact the absence of pathos itself is wonderfully "unpurposely"... you just live with them... fight... afraid... you pursues cogitatively and "as it goes on"... you freeze... you retrench... carry the machinegun on the shoulder... you starve... you scream with pain, finding out that there's nothing more where you feet were a minute ago... you stop from the inexpressible male panic that your "balls" were probably torn off a couple of seconds ago... you suffer when you see the death of a friend... you capture the next trench of the enemy... you jump voluntarily from the plane into the dark sky as an absolute squirrel, and the belt of your helmet tears off, and the pack with ammunition unfastens from your foot and flies into the nowhere at the moment when the parachute opens...
Your Crispin’s day... your Currahee... Bastogne... The Day of the Days... The Breaking Point with the lacking points at the ends...

Michael said: "But there were so many of us running around in green"... Excuse us, we are not agree with you... Because we have remembered by sight and by name everybody of this "so many"... and you... Barton Pat Christenson... in M43 uniform with the stripes of a sergeant-technician and with your faithful friend - MG34 machinegun on the shoulder... although in this mangled DVD-issue little remained of your part... so little that it stroke not only our eye, but also of the persons who joined forums and chats dedicated to the Easy Company, 506 regiment of airborne divisions 101, US Army.

Michael made together with Pat all the way from the training camp in Toccoa (the state of Georgia - 1843) up to the first parachute assault in the Normandy (promising quite different date of turn of the Second World War, but which ended as a full fiasco (we mean the legendary "Neptune" operation, or the "Day of the Days" - the assault of amphibious landing of the allied troops (English, American and Canadian) in the Normandy occupied by Germany)...

The first episode: "Currahee"...
In Toccoa, Ga., 1942, a disparate group of young men begins voluntary training to become members of one of America's newest military regiments – the paratroopers... Under the harsh leadership of Lt. Sobel, members of the newly formed Easy Company go from green civilians to some of the Army's most elite soldiers. As training progresses, a rivalry flares between Sobel, whom the men despite, and lt. Winters, a junior officer who's earned the respect and admiration of Easy Company.

Through the "Crossroads", constantly covering your friends with MG34.

The fifth episode: "Crossroads"
Winters leads a risky mission on a Dutch dike, resulting in a resounding victory, for which he is promoted to Battalion Executive Officer. Dissatisfied with his new, largely administrative job, Winters is concerned about the leadership of the three companies he now commands. After a weekend pass to Paris, news arrives of massive Axis effort in the Ardennes Forest, threatening to break the Allied lines. Easy Company races in to hold the line, ill-equipped for the bitterly cold weather and the entranced battle ahead.

He fought and frozen, together with his friends, in the Arden woods, when the whole airborne division 101 kept the defence in the city of Bastogne, and the 5th German tank army shot the guys from Easy and their brothers from Dogs and Fox almost point-blank, but it could not take the city and was fully deprived of supply support, as all seven main roads crossed exactly in the Ardennes...

The sixths episode: "Bastogne"
In the dead of winter, in the forest outside of Bastogne, Belgium, the men of Easy Company struggle to hold the line along while fending off frostbite and hunger, having arrived with no winter clothes and little supplies and ammunition. Medic Eugene Roe is overwhelmed, on edge and close to combat exhaustion when he finds friendship with a Belgian nurse. Easy Company spends a miserable Christmas in the trenches, and receives the news that the German army's demand for surrender was met with Gen. McAuliffe's defiant answer: "Nuts!"

Seventh episode: "The Breaking Point"
Having thwarted the Germans at Bastogne, the exhausted Easy Company must now take the nearby town of Foy From the enemy. Several are killed and wounded in fierce shelling, compounded by the incompetence of their commander, Lt Dike, about whom Winters can do nothing. Easy takes Foy, but at an enormous cost.

You lose your friends again and again, not only in the battles which have already become habitual, but simply because somebody of them carried a banal sack of potatoes "in a wrong time and in a wrong place"...

Eight episode: "The Last Patrol"
Easy Company arrives in the Alsatian town of Haguenau near the German border, and is ordered to send a patrol across the river to take enemy prisoners. Lt. Jones, fresh from West Point and eager for combat experience, volunteers to lead. While successful, the mission costs another paratrooper’s life, prompting Winters to ignore the order to send a second patrol the next night.

Ninth episode: "Why We Fight"
Easy Company finally enters Germany, to surprisingly little resistance, and has a chance to relax for the first time in a long time. A patrol in a nearby forest discovers an abandoned Nazi concentration camp, still filled with emaciated prisoners. The local citizenry, unbelievably disavowing knowledge of it’s, is made to clean it up, as the news arrives that Hitler is dead.

You are watching how the people is changing... souring and overfills with hatred and begins to take revenge... without the right for presumption... not distinguishing between the friendly and the enemies... only to "that one who fell under the hand" and who turned to be your "Band of Brothers"... You take part in the seizure of the Fuhrer's residence in the mountains...
You are glad to the possibility of adding to your friend the marks which lack to return home...

Tenth episode: "Points"
Once home to the top officers of the Third Reich, Easy Company enters the Bavarian town of Berchtesgarten, and captures "Eagle's Nest", Hitler's mountaintop fortress. Facing imminent deployment to the Pacific Theater, the men compare theirs "points" to see who has earned to go home. However, the Japanese surrender ends the war. A closing vignette tells what happened to the men of Easy Company after they returned home.

Burton "Pat" Christenson did not soured... He passed through all the trials having remained a normal man... Normal in the finest sense of that word... Having preserved the feeling that the man may merit death, but that does not mean he must incur humiliations...

The war has its own laws... The armed enemy remains enemy, and you are fighting against him with "tooth-and-nail"... But you should not kill the one in whose hands there’s no arms...

Chris Christenson wrote about his father: "He loved the guys from the Easy Company very much and cherished this friendship..."
And that’s not all yet... Pat was a painter of the regiment... The author of remarkable sketches many of which as illustrations became a part of the book by Stephen Ambrose, and that one representing the incident in Holland, decorated the cover of Five-0-sink Newsletter in June of 1989...

These two photos were sent by Chris to one young man whose blog dedicated to the heroes of the Easy Company...

Pat Christenson in 1945 and Michael, in the same uniform M43 with the stripes of Sergeant Technician. The modern photo has been made in the surroundings of the Swiss Alps which look like Berchtesgaden very much. These landscapes served as the background to the Tenth episode...

That seems to be all...

"I cherished the memories oa s question my grandson asked me the other day when he said:
- Grandpa, were you a hero in the War? - No, but I served in a company of heroes..."